Monday, December 31, 2012

A writer has tabulated the number of mass murders over 5 year periods, defining a mass-murder as 4 or more victims. He draws a line showing the time when the Gun-Free Zones Act was legislated. You will see that there were a lot of periods before the act when there were no mass murders but only one such period after the act. Additionally, there were also many MORE mass murders in each relevant period after the act. He draws the conclusion that enabling gun-free zones has QUADRUPLED the number of mass murders -- very much the opposite of what was intended by the legislation and very much what conservatives would have predicted.

In the media and Administration’s push to use the recent school shooting to advance their political agenda, they are careful to couch their words in vague emotionalism and obscure terms that avoid any facts or rational discussion. The rifles that they are most keen on banning are exactly those firearms that are least used in murders, but the most protected by the Constitution.

Modern sport utility rifles, which are included in the vague term “assault weapons", are used so seldom for murder that many states do not see a single case in a year.

In 2010, there were 12,996 murders. Firearms were used in 8,775. Of those, rifles were used in 358, and modern sport utility rifles, often called “assault rifles” are a fraction of those. These rifles are seldom used in crime because standard handguns, at close range, offer comparable firepower and are more easily concealed.

Hands and feet were used to kill 742. Clubs were used to kill 540. Knives were used to kill 1,704.

While the type of firearm was not listed for 2,035 homicides, it is unlikely that there were very many sport utility rifles in that group. Sport utitily rifles are easily identified, and so rarely used in murder as to make headlines when they are.

This does not make them rare. They are the most popular type of rifle sold in the last 5 years. Most rifles sold in the United States are semi-automatic. The difficulty of defining "assault weapon" (which primarily depends on cosmetic features) makes it hard to say how many are owned in the United States, but it is likely somewhere between 10 and 30 million.

Why does the Media and the Administration want to take away those firearms most appropriate for use in militias, and thus most protected by the Constitution?
The answer lies in part with a strategy of deception first put forward by Josh Sugarman of the Violence Policy Center in 1988 “The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the publics confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.”

Many who wish to disarm the citizens also believe that the government should have a monopoly on deadly force. This is directly in contradiction with the founding documents and philosophy of the United States, which was primarily concerned with creating a government that was limited, in part, by an armed citizenry. If you believe that citizens should never oppose a government by force, then you want those citizens disarmed.

When the “Assault weapon ban” of 1994 went into effect, it had no discernible effect on the murder rate. When it sunset in 2004, there was no discernible effect on the murder rate. This was because these firearms are rarely used in crimes. They are however, very popular with police and armed citizens, because they make it much easier for an armed citizen to defend against multiple attackers. One of the primary purposes of guns is to deter attack. Sport Utility rifles are a powerful deterent to those who wish to harm the innocent.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably had a conversation with someone in the last few days who asked, “Why do ordinary law-abiding people need those semiautomatic firearms with magazines that can hold more than ten cartridges?” There are lots of sound answers.
For one thing, defensive firearms are meant to be “equalizers,” force multipliers that can allow one good person to defend against multiple evil people. To allow one good person to defend against a single evil person so much stronger and/or bigger and/or more violent than he or she, that the attacker’s potentially lethal assault can be stopped. History shows that it often takes many gunshots to stop even a single determined aggressor. Most police officers have seen the famous autopsy photo in the cops-only text book “Street Survival” of the armed robber who soaked up 33 police 9mm bullets before he stopped trying to kill the officers. Consider Lance Thomas, the Los Angeles area watch shop owner who was in many shootouts with multiple gang bangers who tried to rob and murder him. He shot several of them, and discovered that it took so many hits to stop them that he placed multiple loaded handguns every few feet along his workbench. That’s not possible in a home, or when lawfully carrying concealed on the street: a semiautomatic pistol with a substantial cartridge capacity makes much more sense for that defensive application.

What would you think if a prospective date confirmed the time, the place and the plans for the evening, then added: “Make sure that you come unarmed”? Would you go to the date anyway or wonder what he’s up to? I wonder much the same when politicians and gun control pushers declare over and over their ardent wish to see me and my compatriots disarmed. Gun control has one very unique feature that sets it apart from other forms of victimization. Any incremental success makes further oppression easier.

Gun control pushers already advocate using deadly force against tens of millions of people whose only crime is peacefully possessing something the rulers do not like. With the actions of a few criminals and psychopaths held up as their excuse, they propose victimizing tens of millions of people who are innocent of any wrongdoing. Like muggers and rapists, gun control pushers rationalize their actions by blaming the victims.

Back in 1938, Nazis fined Jews for the damage inflicted on Jewish businesses by Nazi pogroms. Today, mostly certain politicians want to victimize the American people who have been harmed already by violent criminals in government-enforced “gun-free” zones. Taking away personal arms and restricting future availability would make future mass shootings that much harder to counter. Worse, gun control would make more destructive government excesses harder to counter as well.

Gun control pushers have even less shame than typical rapists. A repulsed rapist doesn’t start whining: “OK, so I can’t rape you now, but how about just dropping your pants? I won’t penetrate you now, but you can’t refuse a reasonable compromise! How about just an inch, no more than two, honest.” Taking away defenses and property of innocent people is a molestation and should be treated as such.

HOUSTON – The teenage son of a Harris County Precinct 1 deputy shot a home intruder Tuesday afternoon in the 2600 block of Royal Place in northwest Harris County, deputies said.

The 15-year-old boy and his 12-year-old sister had been home alone in the Mount Royal Village subdivision when around 2:30 p.m. a pair of burglars tried the front and back doors, then broke a back window.

The teenager grabbed his father's assault rifle and knew what to do with it.

“We don't try to hide things from our children in law enforcement,” Lt. Jeffrey Stauber said. “That young boy was protecting his sister. He was in fear for his life and her life.”

On Sunday December 17, 2012, 2 days after the CT shooting, a man went to a restaurant in San Antonio to kill his X-girlfriend. After he shot her, most of the people in the restaurant fled next door to a theater. The gunman followed them and entered the theater so he could shoot more people. He started shooting and people in the theater started running and screaming. It’s like the Aurora, CO theater story plus a restaurant!

Now aren’t you wondering why this isn’t a lead story in the national media along with the school shooting?

There was an off duty county deputy at the theater [Sgt. Lisa Castellano]. SHE pulled out her gun and shot the man 4 times before he had a chance to kill anyone. So since this story makes the point that the best thing to stop a bad person with a gun is a good person with a gun, the media is treating it like it never happened.

Only small-time media and conservative sites covered it. Definitely no splash on the front page of the NYT.

A recent breakup set off a shooting spree that ended with the suspect wounding a man at the Santikos Mayan Palace 14 movie theater Sunday night before being shot by an off-duty deputy, authorities said. Police are shown questioning men outside the theater Sunday night.. Jesus Manuel Garcia, 19, an employee at a nearby China Garden restaurant, apparently became upset Sunday night after his girlfriend broke up with him.

A week ago on NBC’s Meet the Press, David Gregory brandished on screen a high-capacity magazine. To most media experts, a “high-capacity magazine” means an ad-stuffed double issue of Vanity Fair with the triple-page perfume-scented pullouts. But apparently in America’s gun-nut gun culture of gun-crazed gun kooks, it’s something else entirely, and it was this latter kind that Mr. Gregory produced in order to taunt Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. As the poster child for America’s gun-crazed gun-kook gun culture, Mr. LaPierre would probably have been more scared by the host waving around a headily perfumed Vanity Fair. But that was merely NBC’s first miscalculation. It seems a high-capacity magazine is illegal in the District of Columbia, and the flagrant breach of D.C. gun laws is now under investigation by the police.

So what? Neither are the overwhelming majority of his fellow high-capacity-magazine-owning Americans. Yet they’re expected to know, as they drive around visiting friends and family over Christmas, the various and contradictory gun laws in different jurisdictions. Ignorantia juris non excusat is one of the oldest concepts in civilized society: Ignorance of the law is no excuse. Back when there was a modest and proportionate number of laws, that was just about doable. But in today’s America there are laws against everything, and any one of us at any time is unknowingly in breach of dozens of them. And in this case NBC were informed by the D.C. police that it would be illegal to show the thing on TV, and they went ahead and did it anyway: You’ll never take me alive, copper! You’ll have to pry my high-capacity magazine from my cold dead fingers! When the D.C. SWAT team, the FBI, and the ATF take out NBC News and the whole building goes up in one almighty fireball, David Gregory will be the crazed loon up on the roof like Jimmy Cagney in White Heat: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” At last, some actual must-see TV on that lousy network.

Imagine you are walking through the woods on a dark cloudy night. You are startled by a vicious, snarling beast concealed in the blackness. Not knowing what else to do you scramble up a tree, afraid and unsure what to do next.

This is a natural human response to an encounter with an unknown foe. Because of this weak human tendency, military commanders throughout history have studied their potential enemies in minute detail. One man who understood this well was 6th Century B.C. Chinese General Sun Tzu.

“It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.” -Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Following the horrible crime in Connecticut, there is a lot of talk by oath breakers about curtailing freedom. Marxists calling themselves Democrats and liberals calling themselves Republicans have made it clear, “They” intend to disarm “Us”.

From the left side I hear cries for confiscation, and from the right I hear “Molon Labe”. To suggest that this could not lead to civil war is to ignore history. War is an ugly thing, so in the interest of peace I wish to help “Them” understand “Us” and vice-versa.

Cold Hard Numbers: “Us”

Estimates from various sources, from liberal to conservative , have the number of privately owned firearms in the United States in the vicinity of 300 million. Countless polls estimate these weapons are owned by around 47% of US households, or about 54 million. (47% of 114,761,359 households per US Census http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html)

The 2011 US Census shows a population of 311.6 million.
(http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html)

The 1775 population of the 13 colonies including slaves and Native Americans was around 2.4 million.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_colonies)

At the height of the revolutionary war in 1779, there were 35,000 Continental Soldiers and Marines, 44,500 militia and 5000 Continental Sailors fighting for freedom, for a total of 84,000 colonist men. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_war) This gave us an active combatant ratio of 3.5% of the population. This ratio was smaller during the earlier stages of the war, and once this and the 12,000 late arriving French troops are taken into account, the overall generally accepted 3% figure is derived.

3% of our population today equals 9.35 million, and this is only part of the story. I could make a very strong case that due to the fact that we today have a large standing army, and in colonial days they did not, the percentage of active combatants in any future resistance to disarmament would double or more. There are currently around 10 million oath-bound military veterans in the US between the ages of 22 and 50, many of them combat vets. (http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html) I will leave this case for another time, because 3% is enough. Here are some quick numbers for comparison from the Federation of American Scientists.

3% US population 9.35 million

Chinese Military (active) 2.25 million

Russian Military (active) .96 million

US Military (active) 1.46 million

So, we are 9.35 million, but who are we ?

-We are overwhelmingly Christian, and worship the God of David, Elijah and Samson.
(http://cnsnews.com/news/article/gallup-americans-77-christian-06-muslim)

-We are fathers and husbands, sons and grandsons of the generations who won the world wars.

-We are law abiding citizens who have been sold into slavery with a national debt so big it would take a tax increase, per household, the size and duration of a mortgage to pay off.

-We work in law enforcement, City, State and Federal. “We” are deeply among “Them”.

-We are 9.35 million men with battle rifles, not armed because we are free, but free because we are armed.

Cold Hard Numbers: “Them”

During the disarmament trial runs at Waco and Ruby Ridge, it was the ATF and FBI that bravely lead the charge against vicious women and children. Any future enforcement of new federal disarmament laws would be carried out by oath breaking members of these two agencies. Let’s break it down.

BATF (2006) 4,559 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BATF)

FBI 36,074 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fbi)

This gives us a total of 40633. There could be hidden within other agencies additional groups of oath breakers who may be used for disarmament. Because I am working toward a ratio, and I used what I believe to be a 50% low estimate on the “Us” column, I will not add an estimate for additional feds on the “Them” side. Don’t forget that “We” are deeply among “Them”, and “They” live among “Us”.

9,350,000 / 40633 = 230.1

“We” have “Them” outnumbered by >230:1.

Now that both parties have a proper perspective on things let us continue the conversation with the levels of respect and confidence due.

What about the military ?

There are differing opinions about this, most having a valid basis. I will lump local and state law enforcement into this portion of the discussion. I believe that at a local level, you could see almost anything happen militarily in the hypothetical case of resistance to disarmament. On a strategic nationwide level, unlawful orders to disarm the American populace would cause a stalemate within the military. Such unlawful orders would be carried out by some and opposed with force by others at levels from individual to division. Debilitating acts of sabotage both of covert and overt nature, at all branches and levels within the service, would skyrocket.

The US military, by and large, is comprised of citizens of the states and areas most likely to resist disarmament by force. This is the point in the discussion to consider the nation’s considerable veteran population. There are around 10 million veterans in the US between the ages of 22 and 50. We are most concentrated in the areas most likely to resist disarmament. We are the fathers and brothers of many active duty military members. We are armed. We are trained and experienced tankers, pilots, medics, infantrymen and Special Forces Operators. For every Ranger or Marine on active duty, there are as many as 7 armed veterans of fighting age with the exact same skill and training on the civilian side.

Splits within the military in the US happened during the Civil War, and even during the Roosevelt administration. General George McArthur took bribe money and signed on with a group of globalists to overthrow the US Government by force. US Marine Smedley Butler, when approached by the same group, went undercover and gathered information which he took straight to congress. Butler single handedly saved the nation in the most covered up piece of US History of all time. Read “The Plot To Seize the White House” by Jules Archer or “Devil Dog” by David Talbot for more information on this.

When an oath breaking Marxist who throws like a girl gives an order to an oath keeping Marine from Houston to shoot an oath keeping Former Marine from Houston because he won’t disarm, what do you think will happen ? Every active duty officer, sworn to uphold and defend the US Constitution from domestic enemies should think on that long and hard. Although localized actions of all types are likely, I predict strategic level stalemate.

Visualization of 230:1

Now back to that walk in the woods and the snarling beast in the dark. Hopefully the truth has thrown enough illumination your way to see that you’ve been treed by a Chihuahua. Imagine a 230 pound man versus a 1 pound purse dog.

Picture a large football stadium, completely sold out. The crowd versus those on the field and sidelines is about a 230:1 ratio.

Imagine a head on collision between a sport bike and a fully loaded 18 wheeler. That is a 230:1 weight ratio.

Take an ice cube from your freezer and hit it with an Oxy-Acetylene torch. That is a 230:1 temperature ratio.

Take heart, free Americans, our Founding Fathers have got your back.

Is this really worth fighting over ?

According to Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of Hawaii R.J. Rummel, totalitarian governments, mainly Marxist, killed 262 million of their own citizens during the 20th century. That unimaginable number is easier to grasp if one visualizes 10 million Sandy Hook Massacres. These are flat out murders of noncombatants, an act Rummel has labeled “Democide”. I highly recommend his excellent book “Death By Government”, and a study of the information on his website from which I have borrowed the following charts.

Gun Control advocates must be feeling a bit disoriented during the closing of this year and it is no wonder they do.
It should have been over and done with. This was supposed to be the day/week/month/year they finally triumphed over the evil forces of the Gun Nuts. Madman commits a massacre in an elementary school, Mainstream Media goes bat-guano in support of more Gun Control, a couple of RINOs are seen wavering on their their previous pro-gun stance, “people” take over the social networks demanding the killing of the NRA (both figuratively and for keeps), the President goes to the kids funerals to make a political statement against guns and the need for more gun control and Senator responds with an all-encompassing bill. Everything was ready in one nice package of victory. And yet you can almost hear them scream:

WHAT THE F*** HAPPENED THAT WE ARE SUDDENLY IN THE DEFENSIVE?

The answer is obvious: Gun Ownership became mainstream. From 9/11 to Katrina, it became obvious that people could not expect that the government deliver in the promises they made to keep them safe. People that before could not even come to terms with the idea of owning a gun, suddenly realized it was their responsibility to keep themselves and their loved ones alive. And with the acquisition of a gun came the acquisition of knowledge and the lifting of the veils of propaganda. When Gun Owners were attacked by the Opposition, it became personal. When a Gun Control advocate accused Gun Owners of murderers, the new gun owner said “wait one darned minute. I am a gun owner and I certainly did not murder anyone! How dare you!” And then came the nagging suspicion that all those tales and stories about the crazies of the Gun Culture might have been vulgar exaggerations that needed to be examined instead of taken as articles of faith. And once the examination started, the rest was history.

Even after the avalanche of negative stories and upfront attacks from almost every Mainstream media outlet, the NRA has the better image while the Media itself is reaching new lows in trust amongst Americans.

As the emotions subside from Sandy Hook, we are facing a great opportunity. There is no doubt that one or many gun control proposals will be brought in the new year via Congress, but we are now in a position of not only present an effective opposition but start a devastating counter attack both at the Federal and State levels. My particular predilection is to see the passage of the Federal Reciprocity Law now that we have Carry across the nation (even if it is only De Jure in places like Illinois and New Jersey) as I believe it will force those states with May Issue laws become Shall Issue. And yes, eventually I wouldn’t mind seeing Constitutional Carry across the Land.

At the State Level, it is up to you alongside your State Gun Rights organization to decide what problem to tackle first and go after it. I am guessing the elimination of most Gun Free Zones will be hot in the agenda but whatever topic is decided to address, you must support it full tilt. Don’t act like a 6 year old and refuse to help just because it might not be something you consider has more value. We are in this together and every victory chips away at the Opposition’s dwindling strength. Also, do not get discouraged if you lose some cases or fights: it is bound to happen, but we have been winning more than losing so the future is bright if we all help.

It goes without saying that if you are not a member of the Big Pro Gun Organizations, you are being inconsiderate. Please spare me why you don’t like this group or the other because they don’t do enough-do too much-are too agressive-not agressive enough because so far I have not seen anyone rejecting their achievements, just the opposite. Memberships are very cheap and this is a numbers game.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

A bill pre-filed for the 2013 state legislative session would exempt South Carolina from federal regulation over firearms, ammunition and accessories made in the state.

The Firearms Freedom Act is similar to bills that already have been approved in eight states, filed in 40 others, and are being challenged in court by the U.S. District Attorney. The bill, filed by Sen. Lee Bright, R-Spartanburg, isn’t in response to the controversy over gun laws in the wake of the recent Newtown, Conn. massacre, he said. It was first filed last year and is a 10th amendment issue over state powers.

It has its supporters, but its fate isn’t certain in a legislature faced with a number of hot-button issues.

Recently, we discussed St. Louis County Police Chief Tim Fitch, who upset some people in the fields of both law enforcement and education, by suggesting that the only real security against school shooters is the presence of armed decent people prepared to stop them. Those who found that argument upsetting will likely be no less unhappy about his latest contribution to the debate.

Fox 2 St. Louis reports that Chief Fitch is now arguing that new "gun control" laws will do nothing to reduce violence (see sidebar video):

President Barack Obama and others favor re-instating the ban on assault weapons and outlawing ammunition magazines that hold more than ten rounds. Chief fitch [sic] says it’s way too late for any of that.

Chief Fitch says the rush to buy guns after the massacre of schoolchildren in Newtown shows that it’s too late for any new gun control laws to have any real effect. Fitch says with hundreds of millions of guns already in the hands of private owners in the United States, that it’s already easy for anyone who wants to have a gun to get one.

Police Chief Says New Gun Control Laws Won’t Do Any Good
Police Chief Says New Gun Control Laws Won’t Do Any GoodPolice Chief Says New Gun Control Laws Won’t Do Any Good

That "rush to buy guns"--particularly just those types of guns most demonized by the gun prohibitionists--is certainly apparent. Fitch's "that horse is already out of the barn" argument--that it is simply too late to "control" guns--is also well taken.

That is something we discussed nearly four years ago, quoting Professor Nicholas J. Johnson's Imagining Gun Control in America: Understanding the Remainder Problem. In that study, Professor Johnson pointed out that with over 250 million privately owned firearms already in circulation in the U.S., not even the most draconian, oppressive gun laws imaginable can make acquisition of firearms particularly difficult, the oft-touted "success" of such laws in other countries notwithstanding:

This is far more guns than the countries in any of the cross-cultural comparisons—far more private guns than any other country ever. Americans own close to half the private firearms on the planet. Plus, our borders are permeable, and guns and ammunition are relatively easy to manufacture. So achieving the supply-side ideal is not just a matter of channeling enough outrage to finally get the right words enacted into law.

I would be in support of legislative ‘talks’ concerning new regulations on guns if the following three conditions were met:

1 – Get rid of the ignorant and the misleading. All of those involved in the talks should only be the well-versed and honest in the realities of guns. Anyone that talks about a gun’s ‘clip’ or ‘handle’ is automatically out. Anyone who calls an AR a ‘high-powered rifle’ is excluded from the discussion. Any display of ignorance of the way guns work or the way gun owners work shouldn’t be given power over the subject. Skip the demonization of the inanimate objects and give honest and well-supported arguments why such regulations should be in place, based on numbers and facts rather than emotional appeals. Anyone who cites ‘think of the children’ without further context gets kicked out.

2 – The hypocrites are out of the game. Anyone involved in any legislation at all should be willing to live under the laws that they propose and/or vote in favor of in the spirit of actual representation, as was one of the founding principles of our country. This goes doubly so for gun legislation. Feinstein and Schumer, in favor of banning handguns for you and I and yet carrying handguns to protect themselves, clearly don’t think highly of the rest of us and should not be in a position to write the laws that we are subject to without having to live under the same restrictions. Any of the other congressmen who live behind armed guards should be willing to legally protect our individual rights to self protection or should be willing to give up their special treatment. Each of us has at least as much right to personal safety as any of them. It’s pretty easy to restrict another’s rights when it won’t affect you.

3 – Consider repealing standing gun restrictions. If our right to own certain types of guns is on the table – if our very property and means of self-defense is to be on the table, so must be any and all existing gun regulations. If the threat at one radical extreme of the conversation is the abolition of whatever you consider to be an ‘assault weapon’, including my semi-auto rifle and my .22-cal pistols with threaded barrels, then the other radical extreme is to repeal the Hughes Amendment, NFA and GCA and return us to the freedom of buying a new gun at Sears or out of the back of a magazine (the paper kind, not the ammo feeding kind), even the fully-automatic varieties and so called ‘destructive devices’. If you want to discuss making it harder for me to legally obtain, keep, and transport my guns; the conversation should include the possibility of me being able to go armed into court houses, Post Offices, schools, and other government buildings legally carrying the gun of my choice, with or without an issued permit.

It is ludicrous to expect logical legislation from those who don’t know the facts. If you don’t know anything about guns, how can you effectively contribute to the conversation? If ‘representatives’ base their arguments on demonstrably false misinformation, whether deliberately or by ignorance, how can they add value to the debate? If you don’t think people should have guns, you don’t get to have guns. This country is based on the philosophy that all men are created equal. It is wrong and contrary to the spirit of our country for you to sign into law that a common person cannot possess God-given right to an effective means of defense from behind your armed detail and your own, personal gun. Therefore, put your money where your mouth is. Too many people claim to want us to be reasonable and compromise without being genuine in their attitudes. I think we can all agree that compromise is a two-way talk. Don’t expect us to cheerfully come to the table when it is so unfairly weighted. Too many people calling for gun control are claiming that we don’t have any gun restrictions in the country, despite tens of thousands of restrictive laws codified in the books of our nation. Acknowledge that those exist, and enter into the debate whether or not they should. If you don’t like these conditions, we should not have the talk at all. If you want to talk about compromise badly enough, you will be willing to meet these terms.

The Wiki Weapon project is an initiative undertaken by Defense Distributed, a non-profit headed by University of Texas law student Cody Wilson aimed at generating a freely-distributed, open source design for a 3-D printed firearm--an idea that has come under serious fire from proponents of increased gun control in the U.S., particularly in light of last week’s tragic shooting of 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The idea behind the project--embraced by some, absolutely detested by others--is that technology will soon make regulating firearms virtually impossible. That is a very polarizing idea. But to say the very least Wiki Weapons is also a technologically intriguing project, one that forces us to examine some very relevant--some might say ominous--questions about new technological capabilities and where they are taking us, as well as what happens when technology gets way out in front of the law. We spoke with Wilson briefly this week hoping to address some of these questions. Below is an edited transcript of that conversation.

Popular Science: It would be pointless for us to ignore the context in which we’re speaking today, given the tragedy that unfolded in Connecticut last week. Defense Distributed has committed to creating a shareable, freely-distributed design for a working 3-D printed firearm--a way for anyone with a 3-D printer to quickly produce a working gun. Does an incident like this one in any way alter your conviction that this is the right thing to do?

Cody Wilson: No, not at all. If it did change what we thought you’d be right to recognize that we’re not serious. I don’t want to be confrontational about it, but I will say it this way: understanding that rights and civil liberties are something that we protect is also understanding that they have consequences that are also protected, or tolerated. The exercise of civil liberties is antithetical to the idea of an completely totalizing state. That’s just the way it is.

Mr. Gregory has been accused of having a piece of metal of the wrong size. We've all seen the video of him waving that metal box and spring about on Meet The Press, a box and spring that is illegal to posses in the District of Columbia. We can debate the logic and sense of the law and how it is interpreted at a later date. There is no time for that now. Mr. Gregory needs to act before this spins out of control.

He needs to do the right and merciful thing and turn himself in before someone tells a member of the FBI HRT where his family lives.

Officially the penalty for his crime is 1 year in jail. Unofficially the penalty is much, much more. Vicki and Samuel Weaver are sadly unavailable to comment but before their fate is repeated I beseech Mr. Gregory to do the humane thing and surrender himself to the authorities. It's not worth having your children watch their mother die. A year in prison is nothing compared to knowing that your son will never see his 15th birthday because you thought that being punished for having a piece of metal of the wrong size is not a serious matter.

Now that the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department is on record that it told NBC News not to use the high capacity magazine in its segment with Wayne LaPierre, the big media is paying attention and taking this seriously.

TMZ is running interference claiming that NBC News was told by ATF that the D.C. Police said it was okay, but the D.C. Police say they were asked directly by NBC News for permission and that permission was denied.

Friday, December 28, 2012

Few things animate the ire of liberals more than the right to bear arms. Liberals loathe the Second Amendment and when horrific tragedies like the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut rear their ugly head, they are quick on the draw to call for more gun control. But just don’t ask liberals to practice what they preach.

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California is readying legislation to re-introduce a ban on assault weapons. Yet, as Mark Levin pointed out, Feinstein owned a concealed firearm. She said, “If somebody tries to take me out I’m going to take them with me.”

When NRA President Wayne LaPierre called for armed guards to be placed in schools late last week, an irate David Gregory derided the idea during his interrogation of LaPierre on Meet the Press. Yet Gregory’s children attend the same school in Washington, D.C. as President Obama’s daughters. And yes, Sidwell Friends, a Quaker school, employs armed guards.

Of course, such sentiments are hardly new amongst liberalism’s leading lights. Back in 1981, the late Washington Post columnist Carl Rowan argued that anyone who wasn’t a law enforcement officer who committed a crime with a handgun should be sent to prison for ten years without parole. However, in 1988, Rowan would run afoul of the law when he shot and wounded an intruder at his D.C. home with an unregistered .22 caliber pistol. Well, Rowan didn’t acquire a badge in the intervening seven years.

So why is it liberals abhor the right to bear arms unless it concerns their right to bear arms? Why is it liberals ridicule the idea of an armed guard protecting the children of others but don’t give it a second thought when it comes to the protection of their own families? Because liberals believe that if only the world was as wonderful as they are there would be no problems. They see themselves as being in possession of enlightened, progressive virtue and that gun laws should be used to keep arms out of the hands of uncivilized, uncouth conservatives or anyone else who has the temerity not to share their worldview. It is the same sort of thinking that allows liberals to own SUVs, send their children to private schools, and obtain waivers from Obamacare without batting an eyelash.

So the next time you hear a liberal call for yet more gun control or decry a proposal from the NRA, there’s a good chance that liberal either owns a gun or has seen to it that his children are protected by, as LaPierre put it, “a good guy with a gun.” If liberals are honest with themselves they would tell you that they too cling to their guns.

Has anyone noted the incongruity of Sidwell Friends employing armed guards? Quakers traditionally refused to bear arms and most Quakers oppose gun ownership to this day. They are great advocates of "peace" at any price so how do they square EMPLOYING armed guards with Quaker beliefs? Sheer hypocrisy and dishonesty -- JR

So how would Piers Morgan fare with his proposed constitutional amendment to repeal gun rights? Amazingly, nearly three-quarters of Americans agree on handguns, anyway … but not with Piers Morgan. According to the latest Gallup survey taken within days of the Newtown massacre, a record number of Americans oppose a handgun ban, 74/24:

Despite Americans’ willingness to strengthen gun laws in the wake of Sandy Hook and other deadly mass shootings, Gallup finds public opposition to a broad ban on the possession of handguns at a record-high 74%. Conversely, the 24% in favor is the lowest recorded since Gallup first asked the question in 1959.

How about the “assault-rifle” ban? Technically, an “assault rifle” is an automatic weapon, which is already banned. Gallup asks respondents whether they are “for or against a law which would make it illegal to manufacture, sell, or possess semi-automatic guns known as assault rifles,” which is a badly-written question in several ways. Even so, a majority opposes such a law, by just a slightly narrower gap than a year ago:

KNOTT COUNTY, Ky. (WKYT) - Kentucky State Police are investigating a deadly shooting.

At approximately 10:30 p.m. on Christmas night, Kentucky State Police in Hazard received a call that a person was possibly shot at the Jamestown Village Trailer Park in the Talcum community of Knott County.

Police tell WKYT their early investigation indicates that two male subjects went to the residence of Ricky Sweet and asked to borrow gasoline. Police say that Sweet retrieved some gas from an outside storage building, when one of the individuals pulled out a handgun and demanded money. Police say Sweet fought back and gun fire was exchanged.

Listening to the latest media chatter, one could get the impression that murder in the US is historically bad and getting worse. As the Reverend Al Sharpton put it, "The time for their talk is over. Now's the time for action, and real change on gun control."

Actually, now would seem to be a very bad time for such action. The reason is simple: the murder rate is historically low and is already trending downward. In fact, the murder rate in 2011 was the lowest since 1961: 4.7 murders per 100,000 people. In only 5 years since 1910 has it been lower: 1955-59, when it was only slightly lower at 4.5 or 4.6.

A controversy ignited over “Meet the Press” host David Gregory displaying a rifle magazine during an interview with National Rifle Association Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre has taken several turns, due to the law in the nation’s capitol making possession of such a device illegal, with Washington D.C. Chief of Police Cathy Lanier confirming to Breitbart TV that her department was investigating “to determine if the magazine was real,” and now TMZ, in an exclusive report, claiming “an ATF official” told show staffers they could use the magazine after consulting with D.C. Police.

That’s in direct contradiction to a report by The Washington Examiner quoting a police official who flatly stated “NBC contacted MPD inquiring if they could utilize a high-capacity magazine for their segment. NBC was informed that possession of a high-capacity magazine is not permissible, and their request was denied."

Assuming TMZ is truthfully reporting a new development unknown at the time of the earlier reports, where either a police or an ATF official would have presumed legal authority to make that call is unclear. Per D.C. Official Code 7-2506.01, “No person in the District shall possess, sell, or transfer any large capacity ammunition feeding device regardless of whether the device is attached to a firearm. For the purposes of this subsection, the term “large capacity ammunition feeding device” means a magazine, belt, drum, feed strip, or similar device that has a capacity of, or that can be readily restored or converted to accept, more than 10 rounds of ammunition.”

In the wake of the Connecticut school shooting, two gun-rights activists are preparing to return to the Arlington school board early next year hoping to persuade the district to allow teachers and administrators to carry concealed handguns on campus.

The National Rifle Association has been taking heat over its pro-gun response to the Sandy Hook massacre, but some pols are applauding the powerful lobby's plea for armed guards in schools - and are trying to do something about it.

Lawmakers in at least 11 states are considering such legislation to bulk up school security, according to reports.

It is not surprising that the media act to preserve their power and special priviledges. They are not to be held to the same standards as those not in power.

Some political and media types weren't impressed by headlines this week reporting that D.C. police are investigating the alleged display of a gun magazine on NBC's Meet the Press. They took to the Internet with their disdain for the story.

"Excellent use of DC police resources, investigating 'Meet the Press' for committing an act of journalism," snarked the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg.

"When guns are outlawed, only David Gregory will have guns," Slate's Matt Yglesias offered.

On the evening of December 14, when the horror of Sandy Hook Elementary School was quite rightly the only subject on everyone’s minds and lips, I was in my car listening to talk radio. I tuned to one station and then another before choosing Dennis Miller’s program. I was eager to hear Mr. Miller’s take on the day’s sorrows, but I was astonished to hear him and his guest (I’ve forgotten who) discussing … the fiscal cliff. How could this be? It was as if the massacre hadn’t happened.

It took me a few seconds, but then I remembered that Mr. Miller broadcasts live from Santa Barbara, CA, in the morning, but here in Los Angeles his show airs on tape delay in the evening. And so for those fleeting moments I was taken back, in a way, to the time before I or Dennis Miller or his guest or anyone else outside of Newtown, CT, had heard of Sandy Hook Elementary School. How pleasant it all seemed that morning, how trivial were my own worries, and how horribly, horribly different the day would turn out to be.

That fiscal cliff seems not to be such a big deal after all, does it? And now we have all but abandoned talk of fiscal cliffs and begun our “conversation on guns.” Or have we?
Based on what we’ve heard so far, this “conversation” amounts to little more than an attempt by one side to shame the other into silence and acquiescence. If you refuse to admit that you, the gun owner, are part of the problem; if you dare to suggest that the public at large would not be less safe but safer if more law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry concealed handguns; if you refuse to acknowledge what is so patently obvious to your enlightened betters living in colonies along both coasts — which is that firearms are inherently evil and have no place in a civilized society — then you are an abettor in the slaughter of children and deserving of public scorn if not imprisonment and even death.

Anne Arundel County police are investigating a report that an employee in a coin shop in Glen Burnie shot and killed an intruder Tuesday morning.

Officers responded to a 6:28 a.m. call Christmas morning at Arundel County Coin Shop in the 7400 block of Baltimore Annapolis Boulevard and were met by an employee of the business, police said.

He told police that an intruder broke into the business while he was there, and during an altercation inside, the intruder was shot, police said. The intruder ran out of the building and collapsed, police said. Paramedics were called, and the man was pronounced dead, according to police.

Most of "gun control" is designed to make the aquisition and use of guns more difficult, so as to reduce the numbers of gun owners to political insignificance.

Before I have written about how virtually all the denials from background checks are false positives and there is also the problem that about 8 percent or so of background checks are anything but "instant," now comes an example of a different type of problem with a state system.

The Colorado Bureau of Investigation's online wait-time clock for background checks tops out at 99 hours and 59 minutes. The Denver Post reports the wait is now more than 100 hours, leaving potential buyers to guess on exact wait times. . . .

Can you image the costs that this imposes on how a gun show operates? Gun shows are a way that people can buy guns inexpensively for self defense. Making this costly will harm poor

The lag comes with the Tanner Gun Show set to start this weekend. The show's co-owner Ty Blount says the lag means dealers will either mail a gun to a customer or meet the customer again later once the background check has cleared. . . .

When you argue for a living, you can tell how an argument is going for you. The evidence and my gut both tell me that the liberals have lost control of the gun control narrative.

Not for lack of trying – it was almost as if they were poised to leap into action across the political, media and cultural spectrum the second the next semi-human creep shot up another “gun free zone.” This was their big opening to shift the debate and now it’s closing. They’ve lost, and they are going nuts.

The evidence is all around that this is not going to be the moment where America begins a slide into disarmed submission through an endless series of ever-harsher “reasonable restrictions” on our fundamental rights. You just have to look past the shrieking media harpies to see what’s really happening.

Let’s start with the most obvious omen that this tsunami has peaked. President Obama thrilled his base by grandstanding at the memorial, and then promptly washed his hands of it by handing it over to a “blue ribbon commission.” Making Joe Biden its chairman was like staking a vampire through the heart, then hosing him down with holy water before burying his body beneath the Gilroy Garlic Festival.

Why does Obama want this gun thing buried? While intensely popular with metrosexual pundits, coastal liberals, and cultural bigots slobbering at the opportunity to stick it to those banjo –strummin’, God-believers out in the hinterlands, gun control remains poison to Red State Democrats.

MORE than 200 Utah teachers are expected to head to a meeting tomorrow to undergo six hours of concealed-weapons training as organisers seek to arm more educators in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook Connecticut school shooting.

Utah Shooting Sports Council said it normally has a dozen teachers annually for instruction required to legally carry a concealed weapon in public places. The state's leading gun lobby decided to offer teachers the training at no charge to encourage turnout after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

Organisers who initially capped attendance at 200 were exceeding that number by today and scrambling to accommodate an overflow crowd.

Thursday, December 27, 2012

While liberals on Twitter pointed at the shooting of four firefighters in upstate New York as evidence that more gun control is necessary, NBC News reports that the gunman, one William Spengler, was already banned from owning guns.

Spengler served 17 years in prison for killing his grandmother with a hammer in 1980. He was convicted only of manslaughter, and was paroled in 1998. It seems that stronger sentencing for convicted murderers might be a more worthwhile goal of liberals seeking to prevent gun violence.

Spengler shot the firefighters just before 6 a.m. ET in Webster, New York. He’d set the fire, then waited for the firefighters to show up before shooting them. “It does appear that it was a trap that was set,” said Webster Police Chief Gerald Pickering. “People who get up in the middle of the night to fight fires, they don’t expect to get shot and killed.”

Spengler shot himself.

New York already has some of the most stringent gun laws in the nation. Felons, like Spengler, are already barred by law from owning guns according to federal law.

Some interesting news has broken in the wake of the latest push for gun control by President Obama and Senate Democrats: Obama sends his kids to a school where armed guards are used as a matter of fact.

The school, Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, has 11 security officers and is seeking to hire a new police officer as we speak.

If you dismiss this by saying, "Of course they have armed guards -- they get Secret Service protection," then you've missed the larger point.

The larger point is that this is standard operating procedure for the school, period. And this is the reason people like NBC's David Gregory send their kids to Sidwell, they know their kids will be protected from the carnage that befell kids at a school where armed guards weren't used (and weren't even allowed).

Shame on President Obama for seeking more gun control and for trying to prevent the parents of other school children from doing what he has clearly done for his own. His children sit under the protection guns afford, while the children of regular Americans are sacrificed.

The GOP should pass a bill though the lower house that said NO armed guards were permitted in the vicinty of ANY school. That would show up the Donks for the hypocrites they are -- as they scuttled to disallow such a law

Recent months have seen a former Marine from Indiana, a Tea Party activist from California and a nurse from Tennessee all arrested and charged in New York City for possession of firearms they had legal permits to carry back home. All were “nabbed” when they naively sought to check the weapon with security.

These innocents fell afoul of the nation’s toughest gun laws. But few New Yorkers know how those laws came to be.

The father of New York gun control was Democratic city pol “Big Tim “Sullivan — a state senator and Tammany Hall crook, a criminal overseer of the gangs of New York.

In 1911 — in the wake of a notorious Gramercy Park blueblood murder-suicide — Sullivan sponsored the Sullivan Act, which mandated police-issued licenses for handguns and made it a felony to carry an unlicensed concealed weapon.

This was the heyday of the pre-Prohibition gangs, roving bands of violent toughs who terrorized ethnic neighborhoods and often fought pitched battles with police. In 1903, the Battle of Rivington Street pitted a Jewish gang, the Eastmans, against the Italian Five Pointers. When the cops showed up, the two underworld armies joined forces and blasted away, resulting in three deaths and scores of injuries. The public was clamoring for action against the gangs.

Problem was the gangs worked for Tammany. The Democratic machine used them as shtarkers (sluggers), enforcing discipline at the polls and intimidating the opposition. Gang leaders like Monk Eastman were even employed as informal “sheriffs,” keeping their turf under Tammany control.

NBC's David Gregory, the subject of a now-popular police investigation, is on vacation and will not host this Sunday's edition of "Meet The Press."

The Washington Metropolitan Police Department launched an investigation this week into whether Gregory and NBC violated city laws when he displayed what appeared to be a gun magazine on last week's show. Today, the police issued a statement, saying NBC had been told before last Sunday's show that it was “not permissible” to show a high-capacity gun magazine on air.

EVANSVILLE — A 79-year-old Evansville man shot and killed a 19-year-old who was attacking his granddaughter, Evansville Police said in a news release.

Davon Obryant Gee was pronounced dead at a home in the 500 block of South Denby Avenue on Sunday night, according to the Vanderburgh County Coroner's Office.

The name of man who shot and killed Gee has not been released by police because the man has not been charged with a crime, according to city police officials.

Police said Gee got into an argument with a 17-year-old girl at the Denby Avenue home on Sunday evening. Gee threatened to assault the girl and to use a "stun gun" on her.

She ran from the house but Gee chased her down, catching her in the yard and beating her. The girl's 79-year-old grandfather, who was in the house, came outside to help her. He told Gee to quit beating the girl.

According to witnesses, Gee then threatened to use the stun gun on the grandfather. Reaching into his pocket, he approached the 79-year-old who told him several times to stop.

This year marked the 20th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, sparked by the acquittal of four Los Angeles Police Department officers accused of beating the now-deceased Rodney King. During the five days, mobs around Los Angeles looted stores, burnt 3,767 buildings, caused more than $1 billion in property damage, and led to the deaths of more than 50 people and left another 4,000 injured. A story that has been forgotten since then is that of the brave storeowners in Koreatown who fended off mobs with handguns, rifles and assault weapons.

On the second day of the riots, the police had abandoned much of Koreatown. Jay Rhee, a storeowner in the area, stated to The Los Angeles Times, “we have lost faith in the police.”

With the cops nowhere to be found, hundreds of people marauded through the streets towards Koreatown. The neighborhood suffered 45 percent of all the property damage and five fatalities of storeowners during the riots. Having had enough of waiting for police, Korean storeowners assembled into militias to protect themselves, their families, and businesses.

According to the Los Angeles Times, “From the rooftops of their supermarkets, a group of Koreans armed with shotguns and automatic weapons peered onto the smoky streets…Koreans have turned their pastel-colored mini-malls into fortresses against looters tide.”

Rhee claimed that the storeowners shot off 500 rounds into the sky and ground in order to break up the masses of people. The only weapons able to clear that much ammo in a very short time are assault weapons. Single shot pistols or rifles might not have been able to deter the crowd hell-bent on destroying the neighborhood.

By the end of the day storeowners had slain four looters and fended off the mob. It would be 24 more hours until the National Guard arrived and another two days before the riots were completely put down. Had the riots occurred just a couple of years later when the Congress banned assault weapons, many of these storeowners may not have been so lucky. It’s situations like the LA riots, which, while being rare, can occur anywhere from the streets of Los Angeles to far off countries during the Arab Spring.

Assault weapons are legal for this reason: they protect people from extreme cases of assault.

Many liberal pundits like talk show host Piers Morgan, who immigrated to this country several years ago, cannot see a reason why assault weapons might be practical to be owned by civilians. Had he been a Korean immigrant in South Los Angeles in 1992, he would have been decrying, “from my cold dead hands.”

In the wake of the recent tragedy in Connecticut, it is important to focus discussion with a more broad perspective on lawful gun ownership. Instead of creating a media blitz that fails to remember the day when a neighborhood was saved by an assault weapon. But lest it be forgotten, assault weapons don’t save neighborhoods, people save neighborhoods.

Ryan James Girdusky writes from New York City. Follow him on twitter @Ryan_JamesG. If you enjoyed the article please #RememberKoreaTown on twitter.

The ideas spouted by National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPierre in his disturbing statement Friday morning were so bizarre, so unhinged from reality, that the organization’s leadership cannot be considered serious participants in the national discussion over gun rights.

Pure projection. The writer is the one unhinged from reality

An armed guard, possibly a volunteer, in every school? Where do we even begin?

This idea is an insult to Americans hoping the NRA would keep its promise to offer a “meaningful” contribution to the conversation in the wake of the slaughter of 27 people in Newtown.

“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” LaPierre said.

We have 300 million guns in this country. If what LaPierre said were true, and more guns equaled less danger, there would be no gun violence in this country. Nancy Lanza was armed to the teeth, and her own weapons were used to murder her.

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Demands for stricter restrictions on gun sales are all the rage right now in light of the Connecticut elementary school massacre. However, a law student at the University of Texas says new technology will soon change the regulatory landscape dramatically, and possibly make such regulation futile.

The student, Cody Wilson, is among the leaders of Defense Distributed, home of the wiki weapon project. The goal of the collaborative, nonprofit project is simple: to create freely available plans that you can download from the Internet and produce a gun using a 3-D printer.

YouTube video at printablegun.com shows Wilson’s group test firing a semiautomatic AR-15 rifle, reports KVUE, Austin’s ABC affiliate. An AR-15 was among the weapons Adam Lanza used in the Sandy Hook shooting.

Trading the Bill of Rights for some illusory vision of safety is a bad bargain.

Every mass shooting has three elements: the killer, the weapon and the cultural climate. As soon as the shooting stops, partisans immediately pick their preferred root cause with corresponding pet panacea. Names are hurled, scapegoats paraded, prejudices vented. The argument goes nowhere.

Let’s be serious:

The weapons: Within hours of last week’s Newtown, Conn., massacre, the focus was the weapon and the demand was for new gun laws. Several prominent pro-gun Democrats professed new openness to gun control. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is introducing a new assault weapons ban. The president emphasized guns and ammo in announcing the creation of a new task force.

I have no problem in principle with gun control. Congress enacted (and I supported) an assault weapons ban in 1994. The problem was: It didn’t work. (So concluded a University of Pennsylvania study commissioned by the Justice Department.) The reason is simple. Unless you are prepared to confiscate all existing firearms, disarm the citizenry and repeal the Second Amendment, it’s almost impossible to craft a law that will be effective.

Feinstein’s law, for example, would exempt 900 weapons. And that’s the least of the loopholes. Even banned guns can be made legal with simple, minor modifications.

Most fatal, however, is the grandfathering of existing weapons and magazines. That’s a reason the ’94 law failed. At the time, there were 1.5 million assault weapons in circulation and 25 million large-capacity magazines.

There are many countries with more repressive gun laws than the United States that have much higher "gun death rates" and homicide rates. It is homicide rates that count, not the loaded metric of "gun deaths".

Congress is poised to launch into a contentious debate next year over reinstating the assault-weapons ban.

In the wake of the Connecticut elementary school massacre, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., already has vowed to introduce such a bill at the start of the session. President Obama is voicing support.

But crime trends over the past few decades offer a mixed verdict on whether renewing the ban would reduce the kinds of mass shootings that have spurred calls for its re-enactment in the first place.

Data published earlier this year showed that while the ban was in place, from 1994 to 2004, the number of mass shootings actually rose slightly during that period.

Add to that the fact that most gun crimes in America are committed with handguns, and the gun lobby enters this debate with some potent statistics.

A man suspected in a possible home invasion Monday morning was shot and killed after a gunfight with a resident.

Las Vegas police said a man, woman and infant were at an apartment at the La Ventana complex at 2901 N. Rainbow Blvd., near Cheyenne Avenue, when several suspects knocked on the front door about 10:15 a.m.

The man exchanged gunshots with the four suspects in the apartment, and the gunfight then spilled into the parking lot.

A Utah gun group plans to give away a 9 mm handgun to celebrate its new free online firearms classified page.

The Utah Gun Exchange was created by Nick Moyes and three of his friends earlier this month to fill the void left when KSL.com temporarily suspended firearms listings on its popular classifieds website after the Connecticut school shootings.

In a brilliant act of political satire, someone has created a petition to the white house here to create a gun free zone around the President and Vice President. All guns would be eliminated there, and the Secret Service would not have any.

If it is good enough for our children, It is good enough for the president, the logic goes.

I am constantly amazed that people are perfectly comfortable around someone with a gun, if the person is wearing a uniform. Remove the uniform, and the same people become very uncomfortable.

Tuesday, December 25, 2012

This is the lower receiver of an AR-15 rifle, printed in fused plastic filament from a digital model that was, until this week, freely available for download on Thingiverse.

This part is significant because all other parts of the common rifle can be readily purchased in the open market. A person who builds a working lower receiver has, in the eyes of the state, essentially built a working AR-15. It is legal to do so for personal use (at least under US law), but until lately the required tools, time, and talent put the project beyond the reach of most casual tinkerers.

The rise of desktop manufacturing, however, may be set to change all that. Recently, a 3D printed AR-15 lower receiver made of fused plastic filament was demonstrated to fire and cycle six times before breaking.

Andy Greenberg over at Forbes has the story on the removal of this model, and other key firearms-related physibles, from Thingiverse. As of this writing, no official statement appears on either MakerBot’s or Thingiverse’s sites, though the action seems entirely consistent with Thingiverse’s established Terms of Use, which were updated following the the site’s first firearms controversy back in 2011 to include proscriptions against content that “contributes to the creation of weapons.”

Up to now, however, the policy has gone largely unenforced.

From the comments: Sean Ragan on December 20th, 2012 at 6:56 pm said:

I note, as an aside, that it just took me about 3 minutes to nab a torrent containing digital models of an AR-15 lower (and the parts for a 5-round magazine) from The Pirate Bay’s “physibles” section.

This is an excellent essay, but it is long. If you want to think about armed teachers in depth, consider this essay

I didn't want to post about this, because frankly, it is exhausting. I've been having this exact same argument for my entire adult life. It is not an exaggeration when I say that I know pretty much exactly every single thing an anti-gun person can say. I've heard it over and over, the same old tired stuff, trotted out every single time there is a tragedy on the news that can be milked. Yet, I got sucked in, and I've spent the last few days arguing with people who either mean well but are uninformed about gun laws and how guns actually work (who I don't mind at all), or the willfully ignorant (who I do mind), or the obnoxiously stupid who are completely incapable of any critical thinking deeper than a Facebook meme (them, I can't stand).

Today's blog post is going to be aimed at the first group. I am going to try to go through everything I've heard over the last few days, and try to break it down from my perspective. My goal tonight is to write something that my regular readers will be able to share with their friends who may not be as familiar with how mass shootings or gun control laws work.

A little background for those of you who don't know me, and this is going to be extensive so feel free to skip the next few paragraphs, but I need to establish the fact that I know what I am talking with, because I am sick and tired of my opinion having the same weight as a person who learned everything they know about guns and violence from watching TV.

I am now a professional novelist. However, before that I owned a gun store. We were a Title 7 SOT, which means we worked with legal machineguns, suppresors, and pretty much everything except for explosives. We did law enforcement sales and worked with equipment that is unavailable from most dealers, but that means lots and lots of government inspections and compliance paperwork. This means that I had to be exceedingly familiar with federal gun laws, and there are a lot of them. I worked with many companies in the gun industry and still have many friends and contacts at various manufacturers. When I hear people tell me the gun industry is unregulated, I have to resist the urge to laugh in their face.

I was also a Utah Concealed Weapons instructor, and was one of the busiest instructors in the state. That required me to learn a lot about self-defense laws, and because I took my job very seriously, I sought out every bit of information that I could. My classes were longer than the standard Utah class, and all of that extra time was spent on Use of Force, shoot/no shoot scenarios, and role playing through violent encounters. I have certified thousands of people to carry guns.

David Gregory mocked the NRA's Wayne LaPierre for proposing that armed guards be at every school in America. But the NBC host seems to have no problem with armed guards protecting his kids everyday where they attend school in Washington, D.C.

"You proposed armed guards in school. We'll talk about that in some detail in a moment. You confronted the news media. You blamed Hollywood and the gaming industry. But never once did you concede that guns could actually be part of the problem. Is that a meaningful contribution, Mr. LaPierre, or a dodge?," asked Gregory.

Later the host suggested that guns don't prevent violence in schools (he cited the mass shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech). "But you would concede that, as good as an idea as you think this is, it may not work. Because there have been cases where armed guards have not prevented this kind of massacre, this kind of carnage. I want you would concede that point, wouldn't you?," Gregory pleaded.

The NBC host would go on the rest of the segment to suggest that armed guards might not be effective in preventing mass murders at school. Which is perhaps an interesting theoretical argument.

But when it comes to Gregory's own kids, however, they are secured every school day by armed guards.

Scholarly studies have found that the more hospitals that exist in a country, the more people die in hospitals. This alarming conclusion shows that the United States, with the highest number of hospitals, has the most people die in hospitals. Countries with few hospitals have few die in them, a country fortunate enough to be without hospitals would have no one die in a hospital.

It is especially alarming that the largest hospitals, that contain the greatest number of patients, have the largest number of deaths per hospital.

This leads to the inescapable conclusion that we should ban hospitals in order to prevent hospital deaths, and that the largest hospitals should be the first ones banned.

You might not know who Piers Morgan is, because he’s on CNN. (If you don’t know what CNN is, Google it.) He’s a British guy who hosts a show on American cable news because Larry King finally realized he was 150 years old and retired, and CNN had absolutely no idea what to do with his time slot. So far, the experiment has been a miserable ratings failure, but I’m sure Jeff Zucker doesn’t mind.

Anyway, Morgan is really excited about that football player killing his girlfriend and then himself, because it’s an excuse for Morgan to tell all us stupid Americans how backwards and pointless our Second Amendment is.

CHEYENNE -- Proposals to loosen gun regulations are likely to emerge when the Legislature convenes in early January.

The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting is spurring national leaders to call for tighter federal gun-control laws. But several Wyoming legislators say they are planning to sponsor legislation that would do the opposite.

Incoming Speaker of the House Tom Lubnau, R-Gillette, said he is drafting legislation that would end gun-free zones.

He said he still is working on the details and the bill has not yet been filed. But he said it could include allowing teachers and other staff to have guns in schools.

Lubnau said more gun restrictions will not necessary lead to less violence. He added that violent acts are routinely carried out with weapons other than guns.

He pointed to last month’s deadly bow-and-arrow attack at Casper College as one recent example.

Monday, December 24, 2012

We highlighted West Virginia Democrat Senator Joe “NRA A-Rated” Manchin’s post-Newtown come-to-Jesus epiphany on the need for common sense gun control laws earlier this week. But not long after basking in the approval of media outlets everywhere for his level-headedness on the issue, he tried to walk the whole thing back. As he backpeddled furiously, mediaite.com reports that he was heard shouting, “’I’m not supporting a ban on anything,’ Manchin said. He instead reinforced his praise of the gun lobby group, saying, ‘I’m so proud of the NRA, I’m so pleased they agreed to be part of this.’” But Mountain Staters weren’t having any of it and gathered yesterday to let Tailgunner Joe know how much he’s appreciated back home. Reader Bill Bargo was on hand and estimated the crowd outside Manchin’s Charleston office numbered about 200. Bill took a few snaps along with some video (after the jump), including a brief speech by WVCDL president Keith Morgan. He even managed to locate and document the lone Manchin supporter who was on hand, too . . .

A few things you won't hear about from the saturation coverage of the Newtown school massacre:

•Mass shootings are no more common than they have been in past decades, despite the impression given by the media.

•In fact, the high point for mass killings in the U.S. was 1929, according to criminologist Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections.

•Incidents of mass murder in the U.S. declined from 42 in the 1990s to 26 in the first decade of this century.

•The chances of being killed in a mass shooting are about what they are for being struck by lightning.

•Until the Newtown horror, the three worst K–12 school shootings ever had taken place in either Britain or Germany.

Almost all of the public-policy discussion about Newtown has focused on a debate over the need for more gun control. In reality, gun control in a country that already has 200 million privately owned firearms is likely to do little to keep weapons out of the hands of criminals. We would be better off debating two taboo subjects — the laws that make it difficult to control people with mental illness and the growing body of evidence that "gun-free" zones, which ban the carrying of firearms by law-abiding individuals, don't work.

The push to ban standard magazines is insane. It is easier to make a 30 round magazine than it is to grow a marijuana plant. The left is pursuing an unachievable result that will not help stop mass murder.

Rifle magazines are made from plastic, steel, aluminum, or fiberglass. There are 100’s of millions of them in existence in the United States. They are easily made at home. They are just a box with a spring. If you have a few 10 round magazines it is easy to convert them into 30 round magazines. Technology has improved to the point that a person can print out functional AR-15 magazines at home.

Before that, magazines were easily made of sheet metal.
Of course, there is little incentive to make a magazine when they are easily purchased. If standard capacity magazines are mindlessly outlawed as they were with the Clinton “assault weapon” ban, the cost for factory magazines increases and the incentive to make them at home increases substantially.

Printed AR-15 Magazine Loaded

Printed AR-15 Magazine in Rifle

Focusing on inanimate, easily made objects such as magazines satisfies the urge to "do something" without really doing anything except to violate the social contract and to make many millions of people into criminals.

In the wake of a monstrous crime like a madman’s mass murder of defenseless women and children at the Newtown, Conn., school, the nation’s attention is riveted on what could have been done to prevent such a massacre.

William Landes at the University of Chicago and John Lott at Yale studied multiple-victim public shootings in the United States between 1977 and 1995 to see how various legal changes affected the frequency and death toll. They examined many of the policies being proposed in response to the Connecticut massacre: waiting periods and background checks for guns, the death penalty and increased penalties for committing a crime with a gun.

None of these policies had any effect on the frequency of, or carnage from, multiple-victim shootings. Only one policy has been shown to reduce the death rate from such crimes: concealed-carry laws.

DES MOINES, Iowa -- Several top state officials on Friday said the National Rifle Association's proposal for all United States schools to post armed guards is worth considering.

Jason Glass, director of the Iowa Department of Education, said the guards should be trained police officers. Many larger Iowa schools already have officers assigned at least part time.

Glass said he will not formally propose the addition of armed officers at all Iowa schools, and neither will Gov. Terry Branstad. But it's possible a state lawmaker will, Glass said, noting he doesn't know of a firm proposal in Iowa yet.

A homeowner, confronted with multiple invaders, kills one and wounds others. The homeowner is also wounded with non lifethreatening wounds. The link is to a video, and the story is given in only the first minute or less.

1. Mass murderers who plan on killing themselves after the spree are not deterred by posthumous legal penalties. Really. Trying to disarm everyone who can theoretically snap is impossible — witness the Russian cops doing mass shootings against the disarmed population.

2. Mandatory lock-downs deny escape to those whose only hope is being a swift and difficult target. Interior doors usually have glass sections and do little to stop armed intruders.

3. At the colleges where I taught in the past decade, about 25% of the teachers and engineering school students carried pistols, up to 10% of the graphic design students. When VT shooting happened, a co-worker said “Thank god our students carry! If this crap happens here, we can hide behind them.” Granted, I wasn’t teaching at a K-12, but the same reasoning applies to them. In a typical school with a hundred or more staff and teachers, it’s likely that a half-dozen armed first responders are on site, and at least one of them would be close enough to fight back.

The push to restrict magazine capacity focuses on the apparently magic number “ten”. Reduce Americans to ten-round magazines and no more mass murder, they claim. Let’s look at where this leads.

Ten rounds has been the standard capacity for military rifles for a long time. 1895 Lee-Enfield held ten, as did the Soviet SVT and the German G43 rifles. Post-WW2 SKS, FN49 and SVD held ten also. No one would claim that they aren’t formidable weapons even today. So why stop at ten if the goal is to reduce capability of any rifleman?

The first military rifle designed for high-velocity smokeless ammunition, the 1886 Lebel, held 8 rounds in the magazine. So did the first rifle with detachable box magazine, the 1888 Lee-Metford. As did the “finest battle implement ever designed”, the US M1 Garand. Nobody can claim that these aren’t suitable for bloody mayhem in the wrong hands, so could we claim that fewer than 8 should be the limit.

That brings us to six rounds. The Italian WW2 Carcano (including that which was used to shoot JFK), the superb Swiss Schmidt-Rubin, the American M1917 and many Mannlicher bolt actions held six. Too many still?

Five, do I hear five? That would be the capacity of Mauser, Springfield, Mosin, P1914, MAS38, Arisaka, Krag, Winchester 1895 and many other guns that were front-line military weapons until the 1950s.
Four? No, that would give us certain Winchester and Remington sniper rifles in common military use since the Vietnam War. No anti-gun legislator would admit sniper rifles suitable for civilian ownership. The substantial similarity of a deer hunting rifle to the military sniper rifle is purely coincidental, of course.

Maybe three would be the magic number? French Berthier infantry rifle with a three-shot magazine was widely used through WW1. So the real number would probably be two. At which point anit-gun propaganda would harp on the similarity to double-barreled dangerous game guns and the few remaining gun owners would end up with single-shot low-power guns grudgingly permitted after much red tape…until the next confiscation. It’s a lot easier, you see, to go after people reduced to pre-1850s defensive technology. Not that the gun-banners would go after us in person — even a musket or a pike in steady hands scare them — but they would send their uniformed thugs with modern guns. That scenario played out in Soviet Russia, in Communist China and more recently in Venezuela. Once the gap of arms between the government and the people is great enough, such minor matters as civil rights cease to matter much to the rulers.

The mostly disarmed British subjects may still possess a few guns of limited specifications, but they lost the right to use those for self-defense. Storage, transport and other uses are so severely restricted as to make the remaining arms of minimal use. That’s the end game for the American gun banners — but they won’t live to win it. Their demented numerological plots matter less than the million defensive rifles sold this week. Those gun purchases are the true vote — with money, personal time and effort — that will override the hateful propaganda broadcasts and the squawking in the bully pulpits of the legislative sessions.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Before this morning’s presser, lefties had hoped that NRA chief Wayne LaPierre would accept blame on behalf of the NRA for last week’s massacre in Newtown. Instead, he called for our nation’s schools to be equipped with armed guards and reiterated that guns can also be tools of self-defense. That didn’t sit well with anti-gun zealots, and Twitter exploded with hate directed at LaPierre and the NRA:

TAMPA (FOX 13) -
One week after 20 first-graders and six adults were killed by an armed gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut, the nation's most powerful gun organization presented their plan to halt school shootings.
"With all the foreign aid the U.S. does, with all the money in the federal budget, can't we afford to put a police officer in every single school?" said the National Rifle Association's Wayne LaPierre.
LaPierre says the best way to fight fire is with fire.
"The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun," continued LaPierre.

-----------------cut------------------

"I think it's great. It's the best thing that they can come up with," said parent Itania Guillen.

What a ridiculous argument. You have absolutely no coherent argument whatsoever. You don’t give a damn, do you, about the gun murder rate in America. You don’t actually care....

It’s complete nonsense....

I know why sales of these weapons have been soaring in the last few days. It’s down to idiots like you....

You are a dangerous man espousing dangerous nonsense, and you shame your country.

The exchange, during which Pratt remains admirably calm, pretty accurately reflects the general tenor of the current gun control debate, with raw emotionalism and invective pitted against skepticism and an attempt at rational argument. I am not saying that every supporter of gun control is a raving bully on the order of Piers Morgan, or even that Pratt is right. (You can judge that for yourself.) But proponents of new gun restrictions are counting on emotional appeals for victory, which is why they insist that action must be taken immediately, before the grief and outrage provoked by Adam Lanza's crimes starts to fade.

For those who want the uncut, unfiltered version of the NRA presser, this audio is it. It takes a while to listen to, but if you want to here what was actually said, without the media filter, this is it.

FORT MYERS, Fla. - With the whole nation asking how to stop school shootings, one Southwest Florida gun instructor thinks he has the answer.
Alecs Dean, president of International Firearm Safety Inc. here, is offering free gun training to any interested teacher.
"If two teachers call me tomorrow and say, 'Hey, we want to take this training,' then I'll give them training tomorrow," he said.

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Background

“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” -- Thomas Jefferson

Syndicated columnist Charley Reese (1937-2013): "Gun control by definition affects only honest people. When a politician tells you he wants to forbid you from owning a firearm or force you to get a license, he is telling you he doesn’t trust you. That’s an insult. ... Gun control is not about guns or crime. It is about an elite that fears and despises the common people."

The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles -- Jeff Cooper (1920-2006)

Note for non-American readers: Crime reports from America which describe an offender just as a "teen" or "teenager" almost invariably mean a BLACK teenager.

We are advised to NOT judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few lunatics, but we are encouraged to judge ALL gun owners by the actions of a few lunatics.

Two lines below of a famous hymn that would be incomprehensible to Leftists today ("honor"? "right"? "freedom?" Freedom to agree with them is the only freedom they believe in)

First to fight for right and freedom,
And to keep our honor clean

It is of course the hymn of the USMC -- still today the relentless warriors that they always were.

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180) said: "The object in life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."

How much do you know about Trayvon Martin? Did you recognize him in the picture above? If not you may need to know more about him. It's all here (Backups here and here)

“An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.” -- Robert A. Heinlein

After all the serious stuff here, maybe we need a funny picture of a cantankerous cat